3,640 Weeks Late
by TheCrowMaiden
Summary: Steve was about as late for his date as he could be, but even though he didn't have much, he had hope. And it brought him to New York on a Saturday. The prompt from tumblr was: "Steve/Peggy, Reunited in the modern age, but Peggy isn't old". One shot, fluff, AU. Also, I can't believe Peggy Carter isn't a selectable character.


"I had a date." Steve said to the man with the eye-patch, scanning the unfamiliar buildings surrounding him. He didn't know what else to say; he had no clue if he was going to be okay yet. He couldn't believe what he was being told, but at the same time things were too bizarre to be explained by anything else.

Everything was different, even the air smelled wrong, but Steve got into one of the shapeless cars and let the man who introduced himself as Nick Fury take him back to the facility he had left.

At the facility, Fury and a few other agents explained what exactly had happened after the crash, and at the end of it Steve just felt numb. He nodded when required and answered questions when he caught them. The S.S.R had become S.H.I.E.L.D but Steve couldn't see anything of it in the sterile hallways and suited agents, and Fury's calculative nature was a far cry from Colonel Phillips's gruff humour.

They offered Steve clothing and an apartment until a proper decision on what to do with him could be made, and he accepted. It wasn't like there was anything else he could do. One of the agents arrived with a selection of modern fashion choices, but Steve chose something that his father might have worn instead: a simple plaid shirt, slacks, sturdy Oxfords. Another agent gave Steve a labelled plastic bag with his compass inside, and it wasn't even dark by the time he was dropped off into a sparse apartment, a key in his hand and Fury's promise of getting him proper documentation in his head.

It took a week for S.H.I.E.L.D to finish with Steve, asking every question he could possibly answer before they let him go with a promise to contact him later and an encouragement to get back into the world. It took Steve two days to find a place where he could buy a map of New York and, even with Fury's warning about inflation, Steve's eyebrows rose to his hairline when he saw the price. It took him another day to figure out how the New York he had known and the one that existed now matched up, and how to navigate the endless crowd of buses, taxis, and people.

It took ten days after Steve woke up in a time that wasn't his before he was free on a Saturday.

He circled the block twice on foot before he realized that the Stork Club wasn't where it was supposed to be anymore. There was only a small park in its place, and Steve's hope of at least sitting in the club with a drink crumbled. It was only seven or so in the evening, but he sat on one of the benches and listened to the waterfalls as he turned his compass around in his hands. The compass and Peggy's picture had survived being frozen and thawed, the back and white clipping stuck in the lid just a little curled on the edges.

Fury hadn't mentioned the fate of the original members of the S.S.R, and Steve hadn't asked. Some part of him was hoping that even seventy years too late, Peggy would be there with her lips pressed tightly together and her hands on her hips, scolding him with a playful 'you're late' just like she had in 1943.

"You're late."

Steve's head snapped up and he wondered if he should call the number that Director Fury had told him to dial if he had any traumatic flashbacks or hallucinations. Because Peggy was standing there, five feet in front of him with her hands propped on her hips as if she had been summoned by his thoughts. But even as his mind scrambled to asses if he was seeing things, he realized that the woman in front of him had a hairstyle and outfit appropriate to the current time. She wasn't a figment of his imagination, so she couldn't be his best girl.

"You've got the wrong person." Steve told the woman, his shoulders sagging as the rush of adrenaline left him.

"I certainly do not." She said. "You're the right person, Steve."

"You're not Peggy." Steve said forcefully, as much to convince himself of it since the woman sounded so much like her. "You might be her daughter, like Howard's son, but you're not her."

Howard's fate had been the easiest to learn of the S.S.R personnel, with his son all over the magazines and looking more like Howard than he had a right to. Part of Steve distrusted the suave looking man that both was and wasn't Howard, just like he distrusted the woman in front of him that was and wasn't Peggy.

"Steve—"

"I told you, you've got the wrong person." He said again and stood up to leave, snapping his compass shut.

"You're right. I've got the right _partner._ "

And Steve froze. He looked, and looked hard at the woman, and his heart and throat seized up in unison. Even if he didn't know her hair, or the faint lines at the corners of her eyes, he knew her as well as he knew Bucky.

"…Peggy? But how? Why aren't you old?"

There was a long pause and then Peggy sighed, pulling him forward by his jacket collar so she could wrap her arms around his neck.

"You still have no idea how to talk to a woman." She said, her face pressed into his shoulder.

Steve buried his face in her hair and wrapped his arms tightly around her waist. It was her, it was really her. She looked right, sounded right, goddamn it she even smelled right. He laughed when it sunk in, and he lifted her right up off her feet. He didn't want to let her go, not for a single second ever again. But he had to put her down eventually, and a couple wolf whistles from the street made it easier to set her on back on the pavement.

Her eyes were bright with tears, and when she let go of his neck she hooked her arm though his at the elbow as if she couldn't bear to let go of him either. They started walking, Steve following after Peggy who seemed to have a better idea of where to go.

The how and why she only looked a few years older than when he had last seen her could wait as far as Steve was concerned, all that mattered was that they were together and this time there wasn't a war in the way. Everything about that moment was different than what he had imagined, but Steve looked down at his wristwatch and he showed it to her with a smile.

"8:06. I was only a couple minutes late in the end."

"Of course." Peggy smiled at Steve, her bright red lipstick glowing in the streetlights. "Give or take a few thousand weeks."


End file.
